OBJECTIVES: Obesity and overweight are now one of the major global health problems, in 2016, more than 1.9 billion adults aged 18 years and older were overweight, of these over 650 million adults were obese. Obesity imposes a large economic burden on the individual, and on families and nations and leads to frequent use of health care resources. The main aim of this study was to assess economic burden of obesity attributable to co-morbidities (stroke, myocardial infarction, and type 2 diabetes) in Russia.

METHODS: Analysis of the published studies was conducted to evaluate the costs of management and treatment of obese patients and its relation to the selected co-morbidities. MS Excel based model of the medical care patients with obesity has been developed for 1 patient for 1 year for any federal subject of Russia. To measure costs of obesity-related co-morbidities for the state budget were used “cost of illness” (COI) analysis. Taking into account specific features of cost assessment separate models were developed to calculate COI for each selected diseases. Medical direct costs included hospital stays, outpatient visits, ambulance service and rehabilitation and were calculated from the Russian healthcare system perspective.

RESULTS: Obesity-related expenses incurred by the state for treatment and management of patients were amounted to 10.7 billion rubles ($ 172.6 million) for stroke, 11 billion rubles ($ 177.5 million) for myocardial infarction and 565 billion rubles ($ 9.1 billion) for type 2 diabetes. Was estimated that effective weight reduction can lead to annual cost savings approximately 291.3 billion rubles ($ 4.7 billion).

CONCLUSIONS: Obesity associated with significant economic burden on Russian health care system. There is a striking direct relationship between the cost of care on stroke, myocardial infarction, type 2 diabetes and obesity that leading to increasing significant economic and social losses.